Teacology: A New Tea Blog

Today I published the first full post of a new tea blog. The blog is called Teacology, communicating how I like to talk about tea together with ecology, and take an ecological approach to my thinking and writing:

The first full post is titled Locally Grown Tea and Herbal Tea – Sustainability, Ecology, Economics, and is a rewrite or derivative post of my original post on this blog, Locally Grown Tea.

I am looking to have a higher standard for the posts on Teacology. I will likely update much less often, but I am hoping to put a greater amount of effort and care into each individual post.

Wordpress vs. Blogger:

The main impetus for this new blog is a switch from Blogger to Wordpress. I explained my reasons for making this switch in my introductory post Teacology – A New and Old Tea Blog.

But here's an explanation anyway:

• Wordpress.com is really on top of spam blogs. Blogger isn't. I think this devalues blogs hosted on Blogspot domains, and I'm concerned both about the eyes of the public, and impacts on search engine optimization. I want to blog on a more reputable blogging platform that has higher standards for keeping out spam blogs.
• The Wordpress.com team is extremely responsive about bugs. For example, when setting up my blog, I encountered a glitch in the CSS of a theme that I wanted to use. I posted on the Wordpress forum, and within a matter of hours, I had a response from staff that the problem had been fixed. This level of service is outstanding for any online service, and almost unheard of for a free service.
• Wordpress.com offers better options for networking in new blogs with an audience. For example, when posts are tagged on Wordpress.com blogs, they are interlinked in with a master site feed, and new blogs will be shown in this feed even before they have established an audience. As example, check their master feed for the "tea" tag. This helps new blogs quickly reach a broader audience, and it also helps anyone (including bloggers looking to engage with other bloggers) locate posts on specific topics.

I basically have come to see Blogspot/Blogger as a semi-dead blogging platform for some time now. It is owned and administered by Google, but the company clearly does not put as much effort into it as their other products, like Google+ or Gmail. Over the past year, I've been irritated as I've seen chronic problems go un-addressed, problems as diverse as a lack of crackdown on spam blogs, the terrible spam filter for comments, and bugs in the default themes. Without addressing these problems, the Blogger admins have forced changes on us without our consent, like updating to a new back-end system, while doing so in a piecemeal manner that for a time left some components in the old system while we were forced to use new interfaces on others.

I do not plan on updating this blog regularly any more, but I will leave it here for reference, and I may post periodic updates if I ever feel a compelling reason to do so.

I hope that I will continue to see all of the readers who have been so engaging here in the comments, on my new blog Teacology! I look forward to interacting with all of you!

Why I Stopped Updating so Frequently

It's been aeons since I updated! Well, more accurately, since some time late-September, a little over two months.

This morning I'm drinking Dao Ren Tea from Mountain Rose Herbs, a pretty straightforward Zhejiang green tea, organic certified, that was sold for a very reasonable price. You can read my review on RateTea. I have still been posting reviews there.

So why did I stop updating so frequently?

Short story, I wasn't getting anywhere near as much out of blogging as I was putting in. RateTea requires some maintenance and upkeep, and RateTea is more of a priority than this blog. Some good news is that RateTea's traffic has picked up and is close to establishing a new record high level!

I really appreciate the comments I get here, but to be blunt, my posts here don't attract enough attention to make it worth my while to post as often as I was. So I needed a break. I don't feel satisfied with putting as much energy as I was into my writing, if my audience is as small as it was. I've been brainstorming why this is. I have another blog on Wordpress.com that I've used as a convenient comparison, and I am starting to think that Wordpress is a better blogging platform for attracting views. On wordpress, even without having any subscribers, I would post something and BAM, a lot of people would read it, and I also would get fewer spam comments. (I get an unbelievable amount of spam here on blogger, AND the spam filter frequently sends sincere comments into the spam bin, from lovely people such as Steph of Steph's Cup of Tea or The Teaist.)

I think blogger has poor spam control, both for spam blogs and comments, and I think this hurts blogger's visibility. Over the past year, I've reported dozens of spam blogs to Blogger, only to see them stay up for months, and some never get taken down. With Wordpress.com, it's different. I report, and usually I get an email 3 hours later, a personal reply from a human being, thanking me, and the blog is taken down immediately. I love this. So I've been toying with the idea of moving this blog over to Wordpress.com.

I also keep considering the idea of starting a blog hosted on Tea Trade, but the site's slow load times have been a barrier to me doing this. But Tea Trade does have a really rich community of tea bloggers, and it makes a difference to me that it's run by people, Jackie and Peter, who really seem to love tea and love reading and writing.

More reasons:

But there are a lot of other reasons that I slowed down blogging. I also have a lot of other things going on in my life, and I've been publishing more things online on other topics and in other avenues. Here are some things I have going on:

Why This Way:

One of the most exciting things is Why This Way, which is a new group that some of my friends and I co-founded back in January. It's a belief system and organization that is run by consensus, a little like a hybrid of organized religion and Wikipedia. We started out calling it a religion, but after bringing more people into the group who did not think it was a religion, because it is run by consensus, we stopped presenting it as such. It's really hard to know what to present it as. It presents a system of beliefs and practices that are related to all aspects of life--but it is not exclusive with other religions or belief systems.

I think this group can potentially be really transformative. At the beginning of this group, we developed a way of communicating which is based on respect and truthfulness, which is designed to create fulfilling, positive dialogue on controversial subjects. So far, it's been working very well. Our group has had people participating from a broad range of religious traditions, and we've had a remarkably easy time reaching consensus on normally controversial or emotionally-charged issues.

I want to write more about this, but it's getting a bit off-topic here so back to tea.

Branching out:

I've also been thinking more creatively about ways to reach a broader audience of tea drinkers. Sometimes I feel like the existing tea subcultures on the web are a bit saturated and somewhat stagnant. Blogs have their dedicated followings, RateTea has a certain type of viewer, as does Steepster. There is some overlap, with a few die-hard fanatics like myself having presences on virtually all major online tea communities. But I also think there are untapped resources.

A while back I discovered the tea subreddit, which I wrote about. I like this community because it seems to have more of an influx of new people--but it's also limited by the format. If you like upvoting, downvoting, and brief comments with occasional links, that's great, but it's not always my preferred medium of expression. More recently I discovered Tumblr. Tumblr is a little bit of a big uncensored ball of teen angst (something I can relate to and appreciate), but it does have a lot of people on it who are interested in tea, who sometimes post about tea.

I also have been publishing more tea stuff on Squidoo lately. I've been finding my stuff on Squidoo is attracting more of an audience than my blog, relative to the effort I put into it, and the site also provides a lot of interesting opportunities for engagement, including polls, discussions, quizzes, and the like.

So I think I want to dedicate more energy to exploring these other communities, and perhaps searching for yet more.

But I'm hoping to keep updating this blog regularly--although not as frequently as before. I'm aiming for 3-5 posts a month now.

Blogging Advice: Writing on Other Sites

Today I read a post on Sara's blog Tea Happiness titled Steep Thoughts- The Shamlessly Promoting Stuff Edition, in which Sara writes about the Tea Review Blog. I really like the Tea Review Blog; it is a lot like Teaviews, another site that I really like. In many respects, these two sites, featuring a team of reviewers that post reviews of teas, fill a niche that is intermediate between individualized tea blogging and community sites that are open to the public for free sign-up, like RateTea and Steepster.

I did not think there was anything overly promotional about Sara's post, and this got me thinking about when a blogger goes too far in promoting material posted on another site. I am sensitive to this because I do not want to come across as overly promotional about RateTea or any of the other sites that I run. I have definitely seen blogs that cross this line (including ones I would not overly label as spam), and I came up with the following advice to offer. Feel free to take it with a grain of salt, or offer your own perspective!

I think this issue is important for tea bloggers, however, as many of us publish on a variety of different sites, from microblogging social networking sites, to guest posts on other blogs, to community sites, forums, and the like.

When you publish on other websites:

I have two key guidelines or recommendations to bloggers who wish to promote their writing pieces on other blogs or websites. Whatever you do, make sure your blog retains its character, and share things in context.

Make sure your blog retains its character:

If you mostly write detailed posts with a chatty tone, or if you mostly write elegant, poetic posts with beautiful photography, then keep your posts in this style even when you wish to share your writings on other sites. If I subscribe to a blog, it is often not just because I like the content and subject matter, but because I like the style and presentation.



My blog is often characterized by the inclusion of nature photographs, followed by slightly far-fetched analogies between what is going on in the photo, and the subject of the blog post. Just as this Yellow-bellied sapsucker (a sap-eating woodpecker) is migrating south to warmer regions for the winter, some bloggers find it fruitful to migrate over to posting material on websites other than their blog. However, unlike migratory birds, bloggers usually have the best results if they continue to publish unique posts on their blog throughout the year, even if they do start publishing elsewhere as well.

Sharing things in context:

I tend not to like blog posts that consist of a single link to a writing piece or blog post on an external site. This sort of sharing of links is appropriate for twitter, facebook, Google+, and a variety of other sites. By sharing links like this on a blog, you are losing the main benefit of all-out blogging rather than using these other "microblogging" services.

If someone arrives at your blog post, they're set up to read something...at least a paragraph or two, maybe. If they come to your post, they're ready to absorb information, and more than just a single sentence or link. If you just include a link, you're wasting their attention, losing an opportunity to engage with a captive reader. Furthermore, by making someone follow the link to another site, you can sometimes be wasting your reader's time, especially if you share a post on twitter that takes the reader to a page that just links over to another page. It sounds silly, but people do it more often than you might think.

What does it mean to share something in context?

There are many different ways to share things in context. You can write a blog post about a different topic, and link to one of your articles that expands on a topic you mention tangentially or in passing. You can write a blog post that highlights a collection of articles you've written, with a blurb about each of them. And, if you really do want to write a blog post that serves solely to point the reader to one article on a different site, I would recommend:

• Share why you think this post would be exceptionally interesting or relevant for your readers to read.


• Add something unique, like unique or exclusive commentary on the article, such as a personal reflection on why you wrote it.


• Write the post in the style / character of your blog.


• Include such posts only sparingly in your blog.

What do you think?

Do you like this advice? Do you follow it yourself? Do you think I have been doing a good job of following my own guidelines, or am I a hypocrite? Any other related advice to offer, to me or anyone?

What do you bring to tea blogging?

I was recently inspired by a post by Steven Knorr on The 39 Steeps, titled Unqualified but not disqualified. The post is a bit of a personal reflection, but it gets at the issue of qualifications or credentials as a "tea person" or "tea expert". One of my favorite quotes from this post is towards the end:

All I've got is the ability to type 90 wpm, a nose and a mouth, and a lively interest. And the ability to speak English fluently.

I can also relate to what Steven writes about ruts of depression or anxiety, times when I feel powerless. I think in our modern society, nearly everyone feels these things at some point in time, to some degree. When I'm in a bad place, some of the thoughts and worries that I have when I think about the effort I put into RateTea and this blog are ones like: "With so many blogs, websites, media outlets, and messages out there, how can I possibly get anyone's attention?"

This collage of screenshots captures just how many tea bloggers there are:



Those are all member blogs of the Association of Tea Bloggers, of which I am a member. Yet...the collage only shows some of their blogs, not a full list. And there are numerous tea bloggers who are not in this association.

The self-promotion mentality:

It's easy to see what's out there and to get into a mindset that I like to call the "self-promotional mindset". The thought process goes like this..."There are so many blogs out there." --> "Wow, it's so competitive." --> "I need to do a lot of clever marketing or strategizing if I am going to attract significant readership to my blog."

I think this is not necessarily a healthy mindset. At its extreme, it leads towards spammy behavior. I also think it's not based on truth. I think the biggest fallacy in this line of reasoning is the idea that the atmosphere of blogging is "competitive". This is a subjective interpretation of reality, and from my experience, it's not true. Bloggers form a community, and they are more interested in engaging with each other and cooperating than they are with competing against each other.

I also think that at its root, this mentality is based on thinking of blogging as "what can I get out of blogging" rather than "what can I bring to blogging". Yes, you can get things out of blogging...you can generate revenue by serving ads on your blog, or by adding affiliate links to tea companies, and if you own a tea company, you can generate traffic to your website and make money by selling tea. But I still think that this isn't the best or most productive way of thinking about blogging.

Getting out of this mentality: what can I bring to blogging?

In the spirit of the famous JFK Inaugural address, "Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country".

I find it uplifting to focus on the fact that each person brings unique gifts to anything they try. Blogging is no exception. I think that this mentality actually helps people to get the most out of blogging as well...it's a bit ironic, by thinking of giving most, you get the most. But it works like this: the best way to "promote" a blog is to write something unique and interesting, sharing from your own personal experiences, and writing from your own strengths.

What do I bring?

I have no credentials when it comes to tea, just my own limited personal tasting experience, which, relative to many bloggers, is not particularly deep. Visual design is also not my strong suit. Here I am, still using the default blogger theme, and the site that I've put the most effort into, RateTea, was made fun of on the Steepster forums for its visual design (before the recent updates, mind you, and we actually substantially redesigned the RateTea homepage again today, so hopefully it looks even better).

But I do bring something unique.

What I do think I have to offer is an above-average knowledge of ecology, some business experience, some gardening experience from the mid-Atlantic and midwestern U.S., and an academic statistics background that helps me to sort through the piles of research on the science of tea and health, and herbs and health. And I also bring a fairly quirky, zany mind with a knack for drawing deep connections between subjects that most people might not think are related.

And, back to Steven Knorr's 39 Steeps, I will say, I think that tea blog also has something unique to offer. It's eclectic, which makes it interesting to read and helps to inspire creativity. Steven also has discerning tastes, which makes me better able to trust what he writes, and, as diverse as the posts are, he seems selective about what topics he covers...I think a good bit more selective than I am. So, addressed both to Steven and numerous others: stop all the silly talk about not having any credentials! =)

What do you bring?

Think about what you bring to blogging...and consider commenting or writing a follow-up post. I would be curious to read what you personally believe your strengths are as a blogger and a tea enthusiast.

Peter at Leafbox Tea Writes on Spam Blogs

This post is a follow-up post to the post Tea Spam: "Boutique" Spam". I received a wealth of responses to this post, some in private. Several different people pointed out a connection between a tea company and the spam site using automated posts, which I described in my earlier post. One of these responses I agreed to publish on my blog, because it was too big to put in the comment box on the original blog post. This was written by Peter of Leafbox Tea. Upon issuing this post, I received a cease-and-desist letter from the said company, after which, upon consulting with Peter, we removed mention of this company's name.

If you are curious what company it is, we encourage you to do your own research; the information we used to research this post is all in plain view and the public record.

Disclaimer:

The following reply was authored by Peter. As a disclaimer, I will say that it does not represent my own views, but I will say that I think the viewpoint is worth reading and reflecting on. I do not agree with everything communicated in the reply, and I clarify a few points below.

But at a very minimum, it is clear that the tea company in question has some relationship to the spam site, as the company is advertising there without affiliate links, and is located in the same physical neighborhood. In the spirit of Wikipedia I would like to assume good faith. If the sites are separate, and the advertisement is paid advertisement, then it consists of paid links, which is a violation of Google's guidelines, and is an unethical "black-hat" technique to manipulate search ranking. If there is a relationship, then the whole site is such an operation. I would like to encourage the owner of this company to (a) clarify his relationship to the site (b) if he runs the site, take it down, or at least, remove the automated content and leave only the legitimate, uniquely authored content, or, identify the source of the content and how it has been modified. (c) if he does not run the site, to cut off any relationship he has with the site -- including stopping advertising on it.

In the long-run, this will actually be beneficial to this company's business, regardless of whether or not the sites are affiliated. Google is good at detecting link schemes, and it explicitly says so in their webmaster guidelines. Following these guidelines helps to maintain an image of public integrity, and also protect their placement in search rankings, by either shutting the site's automated spam content down (if they run it), or by distancing themselves from the site and helping to shut it down (if they do not).

---

Peter's Reply:***This posting has been redacted by its original author due to the issuance of a cease-and-desist letter. All direct indications of the company and principals in question have been removed.***

I love that you brought this up because that site was brought up earlier this year by a very popular online tea personality. That person linked that site to a currently operating online tea company. I will do the same here, because it took me about ten minutes to confirm that connection with some Google-fu. It is owned by the tea company XXXXXXXXXXXX. The owner of XXXXXXXXX has threatened libel suits for anyone calling him a spammer.

A note about that offending site: It is not intended for human viewers and everything about it is probably automated - it is intended only for Google. When you look at it from a SEO (search engine optimization) point of view, it is a very nice piece of work.

Google checks sites that are updated frequently, no doubt that Google is crawling that thing several times a day. There is a correlation between the SEO keywords used on that site (loose leaf tea) and the keywords used on XXXXXXXXXX (also loose leaf tea). Both sites feature this prominently. However, Google gives a lot of weight to what it calls Authoritative Sites but it doesn't distinguish (yet) from robot created sites and human created sites. The constant flow of content, and the offending site is developing itself as an authoritative tea site (even if humans never visit it) - as it goes up in age and rankings, the sites it links to also go up in rankings.

Now, I did check some of the articles through google and of the five I checked, all were copied from places that are intended to be copied (i.e. ezinearticles.com). When looking for plagarism, I find it easier to grab a large chunk of text from the article and search it in Google. If all of the sources for the site are material designed for this purpose, then he is not plagarizing - its just an aggregation of material meant for that.

I won't go so far as to call the owner of XXXXXXXXXXX a spammer, but in terms of website building - I do think that what he has done is absolutely unethical as a tea industry businessman. He may be thinking that all he has done is built a cog in the great Google machine, but when real humans spend time on his attractively designed site - he is doing a great diservice to tea drinkers and consumers because of the amount of cheap, unsubstantiated, and inaccurate information posted there.

Now, how do I know that the site is owned by XXXXXXXXX? What is my evidence?

~ There are five ads on the left side of the blog. Only one is not an affiliate ad, the one that links to XXXXXXXXXXX. I do think there is a certain irony in him being an affiliate advertiser for his competitors...(affiliate ad links don't affect Google rankings - he wants Google to give credit to the links to XXXXXXXXXX)

~ The physical addresses for each business carry much in common. This is all public information made available on the respective websites. Both companies show an address in the city of Carol Stream, Illinois in the zip code of 60188. Maybe a coincidence, but it gets better. XXXXXXXXX's business address is in the 600 block of Kamiah Court (which is, according to mapping, a neighborhood of single-family homes). The business address of the offending site is 780 West Army Trail Road #178, which is the address for the local UPS store nearest Kamiah Court. In fact, that UPS store is located in the closest shopping center only about a 5 minute drive from his house. It is actually less than a mile away. The #178 would be the post box number inside the store should anyone want to send him a letter. I do not believe this is a coincidence.

~ I have not called the phone numbers I found for each site - Offending Site: 773-458-0092; XXXXXXXXXXX: [removed]; but I strongly suspect we would get [removed] on the line for either one of them. Reverse lookup puts both phone numbers in Carol Stream, Illinois.

My thoughts on this are that, as a member of the community, with a vested interest in the expansion of the tea industry through ethical means and accurate information, XXXXXXXXXX should be boycotted as a tea company until they remove the offending website.

I see nothing illegal taking place there, but I do see badly written articles, that are often written without any substantiation or supporting material. There are also calls to "Trust us" on the offending site, which I find rather repulsive. Additionally, the sources these articles come from exist solely to serve as another cog in the Google SEO machine - and they only exist in the first place to manipulate Google rankings for those who write them.

There is a lot of unethical practice when it comes to SEO, I do think this offending site qualifies by not properly displaying what it is - an aggregator. In fact, the About page blatantly lies about the creation, writing and origin of the articles, because, as we've shown, the creators of the site do not write them.

Again, I am calling for a boycott of XXXXXXXXXXXXX until the offending site is removed or corrected to state that it is an article aggregator, that the articles are not original to the site and that they are sourced automatically from around the net and serve no purpose but raise Google rankings.

---

A few clarifying points:

Back to Alex again: it actually is illegal, a violation of copyright law, to publish content from EzineArticles and most other article directories, in a modified form. I am an author on EzineArticles: you can visit my author profile, as well as a number of other websites. The terms of this site clearly specify that publishers must (a) credit the original author and the source of the article, and (b) publish the article as-is, without any modifications. If these terms are not followed, the publisher does not have any legal right to use the article, and publishing it constitutes copyright violation.

I don't know the original sources of these articles. It is conceivable that they are from a source that allows free republishing, or that the site owner has obtained the original author's permission. However, the use of automated software to write articles written for search engines and not humans is unethical and is a violation of Google's webmaster guidelines.

I also want to point out that Google actually is remarkably good at identifying computer-generated content. Search is the company's primary product and focus, and they have whole teams of intelligent people. "Black-hat" search engine optimization practices can only hurt a company in the long-run...as Google's team adapts to them, these practices will end up penalizing rather than rewarding sites that use them. The same is true for other companies in the search business, including Yahoo and Microsoft (Bing).

Tea Spam: "Boutique" Spam

This post is part of an ongoing series about tea spam--unsolicited advertisement on the internet, relating to the topic of tea. If you did not see it, I recommend reading my original post Tea Spam: Starting With The Most Blatant, in which I introduce the concept of the spam blog. If you don't wish to read it, a spam blog is a blog which uses automated software to steal content from other websites -- plagiarism and copyright violation -- and post it on a blog. The blog acquires readers and traffic from search engines, and makes money off advertisements.

Spam blogs are often run by automated software, so, even if the rate of income / profit from a given blog is very low, a spam blogger can create thousands of blogs and earn a considerable amount of income from stealing other people's work.

I've actually had some victories shutting down spam blogs, which I outline in that blog post, which also gives tips and guidance on how to get these blogs shut down.

Boutique Spam:

While a lot of spam blogs look, for lack of a better word, "spammy" (hastily constructed, and immediately evident to a trained eye that they are automated). Some time ago, Brandon of Wrong Fu Cha brought to my attention a phenomenon that he calls "boutique spam". Below is a screenshot from a spam site which makes daily spam posts. But this site has a professional-looking layout and is extremely well-designed:



At a glance, this site looks totally legit. It has a twitter account with a huge following (over 43,000 followers), and a facebook page. The site is continuously updated with new articles about tea. But...something is suspicious; who in tea has that many legitimate twitter followers? Even Tony Gebely (arguably a big name when it comes to tea on the web) only has 22,000-some. And if you look carefully at the articles, you see something very suspicious: a slightly unnatural wording or phrasing of the text. Here's an example:



Note the headline (click the image to see the full text up close) with the grammatically correct, but extremely awkward sounding phrase "A Brief Introduction Towards Blooming Tea". No human would ever write this. But a person might write "A Brief Introduction To Blooming Tea". This raised suspicions for me...it seems like automated article spinning, in which software automatically replaces words with synonyms, so that search engines will not be able to recognize the article as being the same as whatever original article it was taken from. This "article spinning" has two benefits to the spammer: (a) it allows the spammer to avoid detection by the copyright holder, and thus, avoid legal action (b) it allows the spammer to enjoy treatment as having "unique content" by search engines, which preferentially index unique content and generally avoid indexing or highly ranking duplicated content.

Finding the Original Content:

Finding the original article can be a bit tricky in some cases. Typing the title into google, replacing "Towards" with "To", immediately turned up some results which are obviously the same article. Interestingly, it was hard to find the original article, however, because the results I found seem also to be more spun articles on spam blogs. But...the degree to which this article has been duplicated throughout the web, and the fact that the wording on this article or blog post is so unnatural demonstrates without a doubt that the content is certainly not original and did not originate on this blog.

Shutting down spammers: what can you do to help?

We can all do our part to prevent web spam. Here are a few tips; the first two are the most important.

• Don't judge sites at a glance. Look a bit deeper before passing judgment. It takes a bit more time, but ask yourself: do you really want to be duped?


• Be cautious of what pages you link to, who you follow on twitter, which blogs you subscribe to or add to your blog's blogroll, and what you like on facebook.


• If you encounter a spam blogger using twitter, block and report them using the button / feature on twitter. Same goes for Facebook accounts--there's a "Report" button at the bottom of profiles.


• If discussing a specific spam blog or spam site, do not link to it even in discussing it as spam - it is best to only include a screenshot as I did in this post. This ensures that search engines do not follow the link to the site and end up thinking either that the site is legitimate, or that your blog too is promoting spam.


• Consider some of my tips on shutting down spam blogs, including emailing the domain host, web host, ad host, and reporting the site as search engine spam if it is appearing in search results. Here's Google's page to report webspam.

I'm also curious: had you encountered this site? Did you recognize it was a spam blog? It actually fooled me at first glance, and I had followed its twitter account, so don't feel bad.

Tea, Tea Party Movement, Texas Education Agency, and Web Searches

There are a lot of things that pollute web search results, or at least, make it more difficult to find what you're searching for. Besides tea spam, which I wrote about some time ago, websites that are about tea but are low-quality sites looking to somehow make a fast buck, there are legitimate entries clouding the search results.

What clouds search results for tea?

In the world of tea, the biggest of these is the tea party movement, a political movement that has nothing to do with tea. If you want to know what I think about this movement, I actually wrote a page about the tea party movement on Cazort.net, a site where I share writings about politics, religion, and other controversial subjects. But other entities also cloud the results...the Texas Education Agency (TEA), the Tennessee Education Agency (also TEA), or the Tea Collection a line of designer clothing for children that has, you guessed it, nothing to do with tea. Another "tea" that is so esoteric that it does not usually appear in my search results is the town of Tea, South Dakota.

Numerous tea bloggers have written about these various subjects which crop up in their searches. Katrina recently wrote a post Stop stealing my tea! which references an earlier post by lahikmajoe, anything but a Tea Party? And I'm sure I've missed many other great posts on this topic.

How to search effectively:

Fortunately, there are easy ways to filter out these unwanted search results from your tea searches. I want to offer a few tips of how to effectively search for tea, filtering out unwanted results, without overzealously removing legitimate results.

In google (which is used both for google search and google alerts, something that many tea bloggers and others in the tea industry use) and in fact on most search engines and even many local search features of websites, you can include a minus sign (-) before a word or phrase in quotes to exclude things. For example, I often search:

• tea -party -partiers


• tea -"Texas education"

Note that you might not want to search for tea -texas or tea -education because there might be relevant tea-related searches that include the terms "Texas" or "education" but do not refer to the Texas Education Agency. Sometimes I include the term -bagger, as a lot of anti-tea-party rants refer to "tea baggers" without ever mentioning the term "party" or "partiers".

These same principles are also useful if you are an advertiser who is buying pay-per-click advertising through a keyword-based service like google AdWords. In this case, the excluded words are called "negative keywords": they can help you better reach your target audience.

Filter your searches only if necessary:

My advice though is to not use these sorts of filtered searches unless they're necessary. People may write about an actual tea party, or there may be an interesting news item about tea on a page that contains the text "party" somewhere on the page, even if the page itself is not about the tea party movement.

If you're sorting through pages of irrelevant results to find one or two relevant ones, then consider filtering things out. But if you just see one or two irrelevant items in a page of highly relevant results, you're probably better off just skipping over them manually.

What have your experiences with irrelevant results in tea-related searches, alerts, or advertising been?

Are there any major topics that show up in tea searches that I missed here? Have you found any effective ways to filter your searches beyond what I mentioned here?

More Tea Spam: Blog Comment Spam

Following the theme of tea-related spam, I would like to address another topic: blog comment spam. This post is not much about tea, but I am sharing it because this problem is widespread on tea blogs.

What is blog comment spam?

Blog comment spam is a form of unsolicited advertisement in which a spammer, looking to promote their own website, leaves a comment on a blog solely with the intention of promoting their website. This usually happens in the form of the spammer linking to their website in the website field of the blog comment, and it can also happen when the spammer includes live hyperlinks in the text of their comment.

The spammer benefits by receiving free links (and thus visibility and traffic) to their website, which produces direct benefits of driving traffic to their site (often resulting in cash from advertising or sales) and indirect benefits of more links to their site, which can be factored into search engine listings. The blogger and the blog's readers are harmed because their blog now contains irrelevant comments linking to a low-quality website.

Search engines, especially the better ones like google, are pretty good at detecting spam, so it is unlikely that comment spam helps websites much from a search engine optimization standpoint, but spammers persist in these activities because they often result in measurable traffic to their sites, especially when they comment on high-traffic blogs.

Tips for bloggers to detect spam comments:

Blogspot, wordpress, disqus, and most blog commenting systems incorporate some sort of automated spam detection and protection. However, spam comments still slip through the cracks frequently. Usually they are easy to identify, but I find the following guidelines useful:

• Spammers frequently use anchor text as their name when commenting. For example, you will find a comment from someone with "green tea" or "best herbal tea" or "supplements" listed as their "name". Genuine commenters will almost never do this.


• Spammers will leave a comment that is only tangentially related to your post, but that do not demonstrate that they've actually read the post. For example, if the title tag of your post says something about herbal tea, the spammer might leave a comment that is about herbal tea, but it is a generic or vaguely general topic which could have been left on any blog post about herbal tea.


• Generic complements or thanks from new and unfamiliar users are often a sure sign of spam. Posts like "Thanks so much for this post!" or "Wow, this is such useful information, thank you for sharing!" are favorites of spammers...they attempt to lure a person in to approve the comment by stroking their ego...but in reality these messages can be left in bulk by automated programs. Accept compliments, but only genuine ones...if the compliment could have been generated by an automated program because it does not reference anything in your post, it's highly likely that it was an automatic spam post.

The fine line between spam and legitimate commenting:

The art of spam detection is complex and not straightforward. Sometimes I receive comments on my blogs that I am not sure whether or not to publish. For example, I have received comments that have spammy-looking anchor text as the name, but the comment is intelligent and makes clear that the person has actually read the post, and leads to a high-quality website. Other times, I have received comments from a person who identifies themselves by name and links to a personal blog, and it's not clear to me whether their intentions were to promote their blog or to genuinely engage in conversation.

On the other end of things, I have occasionally had my comments on other people's blogs not published (possibly because they were seen as spammy) myself. I hope that I do not come across as spammy, but to be honest, I have sometimes commented on blogs with the specific intention of letting a blogger know about a specific page or resource that I have recently created or published. While I usually follow my own rules of etiquette, I understand that not everyone has the same set of rules, and I do not fault other bloggers for not approving my comments.

Tips for blog commenters to avoid being perceived as spam:

• Don't take it personally if you comment sincerely on a blog post and it does not get published. It might have gotten erroneously caught in the blogger's spam filter. Or that user may have an overzealous view towards spam prevention. Or they might just not like your comment--I've had a few comments that were clearly not spam, but that I did not publish because I did not want the perspective that they communicated to be passed on to others. Spam is not the only reason that bloggers delete comments.


• Use your real name, or at least a publicly established pseudonym, when commenting. If you use anchor text as your name when you comment, you're highly likely to be perceived as spam.


• Read the blog post before commenting. Comment only if you have something intelligent or valuable to contribute.


• Be cautious when complimenting or thanking a blogger that you have never interacted with before. I do this frequently, and I think it's a good thing to do...but make sure to be highly specific in your praises and thanks so that the person can be sure that you actually read, understood, and appreciated the post.

For more information, Wikipedia has some good info on their page spam in blogs.

Have you encountered comment spam, on your tea blog, or elsewhere? Do you have any further advice? Any thoughts? Anyone have a somewhat different view of blog comment spam?

Tea Spam: A Victory Against Spam Blogs

This past December I wrote an introduction to tea spam, talking about spam blogs, stolen content, and related topics. I had planned to follow up on this post by talking about other issues, such as blog comment spam, and I hope to do this soon. But I want to first highlight a recent victory I had in the realm of spam.

I recently caught, using google alerts, yet another plagiarist who had stolen things I had written online. Although articles I write about tea are the primary target for plagiarism by spammers, this time, the spammer had taken the text from a review I had written on Amazon.com. I looked up the domain host of the website, which was a .TK domain, and emailed both their copyright and abuse departments, with the following message:

Dear Abuse / Copyright Departments:

The following site is a spam blog:

[REMOVED FOR PRIVACY]

It is stealing content from amazon.com reviews and discussions. I
found some of my content stolen:

[REMOVED FOR PRIVACY]

Please shut this site down. Thanks.

Alex Zorach

I received a reply the same day, less than three hours later:

Dear Sir/Madam,

Dot TK is the exclusive registry for the
Country Code Top Level Domain for the island
of Tokelau (also known as "ccTLD").

Dot TK (.TK) registers domain names globally,
through our services Free Domain and Paid Domain.

As your email alerts us to
unacceptable content by a holder of a Dot TK domain, I
have researched the case. The user is in
fact a Free Domain registrant, therefore
because of the violation, the domain has
been cancelled and the registrant has been
removed from our database.

Thank you for your assistance & I apologise for any
offense or inconvenience caused.

With Kind Regards,

Dot TK Support

Victory!

I was impressed by the quick response from the Dot TK Support team, and I have left this experience feeling empowered, which is why I am writing this post to encourage others to pursue and crack down on spammers. It only takes minutes or seconds to look up a host and send a brief email to the copyright and/or abuse departments of the relevant company. There are different companies one can target:

• The domain host


• The web host, if it is different from the domain host


• Any ad host, if the site is serving ads (I.e. Google AdSense)


• Search engines, if the site is ranking high in search results and drawing traffic away from more legitimate sites.

No company wants to support unethical or spammy practices. I also have had luck shutting down a number of other spam blogs, including ones that have stolen my articles about tea. I have had luck in some cases with the domain hosts, like in this case, the web host, especially when it is a free blogging platform like wordpress.com, and I have also succeeded at getting Google Adsense terminated on sites where I did not get anywhere sending complaints to the domain or web host. I have also seen sites removed from Google's search results after I have submitted spam reports to Google search. I chose this example because it was powerful and encouraging, but in the past months, I have seen dozens of spam blogs shut down or excluded from various rankings and services, shortly following my complaints.

Although spam blogs and plagiarists can seem like an insurmountable problem, as spammers can set up a new site in minutes and use automated programs to scrape content and modify the text so it is harder to detect as being from the original source, it also only takes minutes to shut spammers down. When someone's hosting account, advertising account, or other accounts are terminated, it is a permanent setback, often affecting all of the spammer's websites, not just the one you targetted. Pursuing plagiarists and spammers is one activity that is worth the investment of time it takes.

Tea Spam - Starting with the Most Blatant

Brandon of Wrong Fu Cha has inspired me to write about spam in the world of tea. I am going to follow up with this post later with a post on more subtle spamming techniques, but this post will get the basics out there.

What is spam?

We all know what unsolicited email spam is. But unfortunately, spam is not limited to your inbox: it also occurs on blogs and webpages. I prefer a broader definition of spam. Wikipedia has a good page on spam blogs, which is not the same as blog spam (which is the leaving of unsolicited advertisements in blog comments). I also consider sites to be spam if the site is exclusively oriented toward selling a product.

In the world of tea, many spam sites center around selling green tea or oolong tea (usually spelled wu long, or presented as wu yi tea) as a weight loss product. These sites overlap a lot with sites selling the acai berry.

Spam Sites and the Squeeze Page:

If you've ever searched for tea online, and probably even if you haven't, you're likely to have encountered spammy websites promoting weight loss products. Here is a screenshot of a typical spam site:



This is an example of what is called a squeeze page: the page looks rich, filled with lots of different images and text, but all of it points visually to a single link, which is selling a product. The only other outgoing links on the page are typically to ads. This way, the owner of the site either feeds the person through to a payout page, or earns money when the visitor to the site clicks an ad to another site (pictured on the right of the above screenshot).

Spam Blogs and Stolen Content:

Besides the overt squeeze page, a number of spam blogs operate by posting other people's stolen articles, text, and images. The articles are usually taken from other websites, often by automated scripts, and are then posted in the blog. Different spam blogs serve different purposes: some want to make money through advertisements or affiliate links, whereas others serve to promote other websites selling a product or making money through ads or affiliate programs.

Is this a problem with tea-related topics?

Absolutely. There are so many spam blogs in the topic of tea that it renders google blog search almost useless. This is especially true of green tea, due to all the health hype on this topic. If you check a google blog search on "tea -party" (filtered to avoid tea party political blogs, which otherwise dominate the results) you see mostly spam. A search on "green tea" is even worse.

Why is this a problem worth dealing with and not just an annoyance?

All this spam makes it harder for people to locate what they're looking for and find accurate information about tea. In addition, the spammers are earning money -- and our society would be better off if that money were instead in the hands of people who were providing a valuable service to society rather than just junking up the internet.

Dealing with spam sites:

The most important thing about spam sites is to not link to them, and not link to articles that link to them, as this indirectly helps promote the sites. This may seem common sense, but I routinely see newer bloggers and casual internet users falling into this trap. But there is more you can do to actually crack down on these sites.

If you ever see a spam site hosted at wordpress.com or blogger.com, you can use the built-in facilities of these blogging sites to report the blogs as spam. Blogger displays a "Report Abuse" option in the toolbar at the top of each blog. If you don't see this link (some spam bloggers use clever javascript code to disable this feature), you can go directly to Blogger's page to report spam blogs. For wordpress, you must be logged on, and then under "Blog Info" on the toolbar you can select "Report as spam". Wordpress in particular is very good at quickly cracking down on these sites.

If you see a spam site returned in google search results, you can also submit a Google spam report. This is only appropriate in some cases, such as if a site is overtly violating google's guidelines (the checkboxes on that page give a clear sense of how and when this reporting form is appropriate), but when it is appropriate, it will result in google quickly pulling this page from search results.

If a spam site has google ads, most importantly, do not click the ads, as this will generate money for the spammer. However, there is a little link on the ads that reads "Ads by google"; if you click this link it takes you to a page that allows you to report the ads for a violation of google's guidelines. If the website has cleverly disabled this link but you're sure the ads are google ads, you can directly visit Google's page to report an adsense violation.

Does it work?

Yes. Even if you choose to do only one or two of these things and only when it is convenient or very straightforward, you will be helping to make the web a better place. I am consistently surprised by how quickly I see spam sites taken down after I report them. Usually, one person reporting them is enough to get them taken down, often in less than 24 hours.